After mob violence at Claremont McKenna College against people trying to hear intellectual Heather Mac Donald speak on criminal justice, the president of the affiliated Pomona College David Oxtoby sent out an email:

Academic Freedom and Free Speech
Published: Friday, April 7, 2017

I am troubled by last night’s events, during which access to a speaking event was blocked and, as a result, community members were unable to attend a lecture at Claremont McKenna College’s Athenaeum. We remain fully committed to the exercise of free speech and academic freedom at Pomona College, while affirming the value of nondiscrimination and condemning racism in all forms.

Colleges and universities have a unique opportunity and responsibility to bring challenging issues forward for dialogue, even by those with whom we may disagree or whose speech we find offensive. Protest has a legitimate and celebrated place on college campuses. What we cannot support is the act of preventing others from engaging with an invited speaker. Our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth, the collaborative development of knowledge and the betterment of society. Our shared commitment to these values is critical to educating leaders who are prepared to craft solutions to the most complex problems we face.

Seems pretty unobjectionable, right?

Wrong.

Twenty black students published an open letter in response, which does a pretty job of explicating the growing conventional wisdom. There’s not much point in listening to college students for new ideas, but they can be pretty good at parroting back the received wisdom of the current year. Young people tend to be more artless than the more experienced, so they don’t know when to obscure the ideas they’ve picked up in class for a general audience, which can make what they have to say more illuminating about How They Think Now.

Dear David Oxtoby,

… We believe that given your position as President of this institution your voice holds significant weight in campus discourse. That power comes with immense responsibility, especially when you could dictate campus culture, climate, and the alleged mission of this institution.

I visited Claremont, CA 13 years ago to investigate Professor Kerri F. Dunn’s hate hoax in which she tried to frame her white male students for the trashing of her Honda. But a couple of bystanders had observed her messing up her car herself, so she was eventually arrested, but not until after a giant night rally in which students cheered her bravery in standing up to the shadowy forces of hate and West Coast Straussianism stalking the campus.

One thing I remember from reading all the fliers on bulletin boards was how obsessed all the identity interest groups on campus were with discussing whether or not the campus climate was comfortable for them. It was 72 degrees with a 5 mph breeze blowing, so it seemed okay to me.

As President, you are charged with upholding principles of Pomona College. Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies

In the W.E.B. Du Bois era, black folk had souls. Now, in the Teh-Genius Coates age, they just have bodies. What happened?

Or this could be a hoax. I don’t know.

, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves. The paradox is that Pomona’s past is rooted in domination of marginalized peoples and communities and the student body has a significant population of students from these backgrounds. Your recent statement reveals where Pomona’s true intentions lie.

Free speech, a right many freedom movements have fought for, has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions. It has not just empowered students from marginalized backgrounds to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution, but it has given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry. Thus, if “our mission is founded upon the discovery of truth,” how does free speech uphold that value? The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths (coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’) that the institution promotes. Pomona cannot have its cake and eat it, too. Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing. In addition, non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Your statement contains unnuanced views surrounding the academy and a belief in searching for some venerated truth. Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.

The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples. We, Black students, exist with a myriad of different identities. We are queer, trans, differently-abled, poor/low-income, undocumented, Muslim, first-generation and/or immigrant, and positioned in different spaces across Africa and the African diaspora. The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.

The idea that the search for this truth involves entertaining Heather Mac Donald’s hate speech is illogical. If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live. Why are you, and other persons in positions of power at these institutions, protecting a fascist and her hate speech and not students that are directly affected by her presence?

Advocating for white supremacy and giving white supremacists platforms wherefrom their toxic and deadly illogic may be disseminated is condoning violence against Black people. Heather Mac Donald does not have the right to an audience at the Athenaeum, a private venue wherefrom she received compensation. Dictating and condemning non-respectable forms of protest while parroting the phrase that “protest has a celebrated” place on campus is contradictory at best and anti-Black at worst.

This is not an argument rooted in Heather’s loss of “free speech” or academic freedom. She is a well-known public figure, her views are well documented. Rather, our praxis is focused on not allowing her anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which she does not have the right to. Engaging with her, a white supremacist fascist supporter of the police state, is a form of violence.

Protest that doesn’t disrupt the status quo is benign and doesn’t function to overthrow systems of oppression, which is the ultimate goal.

To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07pm (since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives). Also, we demand a revised email sent to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017, apologizing for the previous patronizing statement, enforcing that Pomona College does not tolerate hate speech and speech that projects violence onto the bodies of its marginalized students and oppressed peoples, especially Black students who straddle the intersection of marginalized identities, and explaining the steps the institution will take and the resources it will allocate to protect the aforementioned students.

We also demand that Pomona College and the Claremont University Consortium entities take action against the Claremont Independent editorial staff (http://claremontindependent.com/meet-the-staff/) for its continual perpetuation of hate speech, anti-Blackness, and intimidation toward students of marginalized backgrounds. Provided that the Claremont Independent releases the identity of students involved with this letter and such students begin to receive threats and hate mail, we demand that this institution and its constituents take legal action against members of the Claremont Independent involved with the editing and publication process as well as disciplinary action, such as expulsion on the grounds of endangering the wellbeing of others.

By the way, I have a dull anecdote involving Pomona College president David Oxtoby.

My condo building in Chicago had “The Oxtoby, 1923″ carved above the door. Nobody who lived in it had any idea who or what an Oxtoby was. Since this was before the Internet, I decided to look in the phone book and found there was only one person in Chicago named Oxtoby: David Oxtoby of Hyde Park. So I called him.

A man with a very distinguished speaking voice answered. He thought it was a very good question and gave a short, highly lucid explanation of the etymology of his family name. He said it’s an old English place name derived from the transport of oxen, much like the more famous “Oxford” has to do with where the oxen cross the river. It meant something like “oxen go by.”

When I hung up I assumed he must be a U. of Chicago professor. (He was dean of physical sciences there.)

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non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

This is all pretty clear: simply put, it’s a demand for black supremacy. As for the tone of the letter, it’s a somewhat amusing mishmash of a juvenile lack of decorum and civility combined with a smattering of SAT words. It sounds like something written by an arrogant 8th grader with the aid of a dictionary and a thesaurus.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

One interesting feature re the Zimmerman-Martin controversy four years back was that when white leftoids talked long enough, what was implicit in their thinking emerged passably clearly; that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

So many strange modifiers in this statement such as "open spaces." Is there some inherent ability to do better in closed spaces, confined spaces or hidden spaces? Like a prison... It's clearly a sort of humanities buzz phrase that makes no sense in this context. That is a pretty good summary of this whole piece - lots of academic word construction with little connection to the subject at large amid little real substance.

Why not just say "this speaker draws people to believe that blacks are more dangerous and less intelligent. It makes stereotypes which encourage discrimination. We disagree with her opinions. Here is our reasoning."

Putting aside philosophical musings, I would say that truth is a precondition to wellbeing. For example, if the truth is that various diseases are caused by viruses, bacteria, etc. and you prefer your own "truth" that diseases are caused by evil spirits or you deny that such a thing as "truth" even exists and refuse to be vaccinated or to observe the rules of sanitation, they this will ENDANGER your own well being (and especially that of your children). Our whole modern existence is predicated on a search for "truth" - the true laws of physics, biology, etc.

PS what does "our abilities to exist in open spaces" even mean? One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn't quite make sense.

Its an interesting argument insofar as society goes - wellbeing may be a more useful goal than truth for a society, for example, the notion that the belief in an all seeing God is valuable even there isn't one.

For an university, however, it is supposed to be an institution of truth-seeking.

Someone more attuned to the skills involved might make a meme of this headline, with a photo of someone like Cornel West deep in thought, and start posting it on… well that’s the problem. I could easily figure out how to make a “meme”, but I don’t know where to post it to get traction.
I don’t think I actually want to go this route personally, but…. if it’s you, go.
EDIT: Maybe I’ll look into it. I guess I shouldn’t make suggestions that I’m not willing to follow through on myself. It’s kind of pathetic actually. Live and learn.

It is not absurd at all to suppose that at least some of the people responsible for this stuff are hard-core secret alt-rightists. I don't know how true that is, but I don't think it is absurd. I am fairly confident that a non-trivial fraction of "cishet white men" who hold SJW positions are secret "alt-rightists". Not all, by any means. But some.

This is part of what Tom Wolfe called mau-mauing the flak catchers. You try to throw the bureaucrats off balance by making absurd unreasonable (including unreasonably specific) demands. This is like rock stars asking for the brown M&Ms to be taken out of the candy in their dressing rooms - it's just a way of demonstrating your power.

Public discourse in modern America is largely defined and controlled by a consciousness created by elite media — and in that context, Whites have been for decades little more than scapegoats — what’s changing now is that more Whites are recognizing that fact.

Define Black Identity. Define Hispanic Identity. You don't care about definitions. You just think one group is illegitimate https://t.co/CY5OexshuK

Define Black Identity. Define Hispanic Identity. You don't care about definitions. You just think one group is illegitimate.

The fact is that 'Identity', in these cases is moronic. We identify 'ford' with vehicles, the AF with planes, etc. We cannot identify certain groups with a race. Let me give you an example. I know black Jews, red headed Jews, brown Jews, Scandinavian type Jews, etc. SO are Jews a race or a creed? After reading Isabella of Spain, I found out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism! So taking this example, obviously Talmudist were doing same in other lands, i.e. Poland, Germany, France, Russia, and even in the Mohamedan lands, of the Ottoman Empire, etc.

So with blacks. I noticed different features of the black group of humanity. Slender faced, round ugly faced, and in between. Short, tall, etc.

with the so called "Hispanic'. There are Scandinavian type Hispanics, brown Hispanics, black Hispanics, etc. So, no! there is not an 'Identity' of Hispanics. Argentina is the whitest nation in the Americas, and yet, are considered Hispanics!. So there you have it. At the end of the day, the three groups in humanity, Pale, black, and mongoloid, still has a valid point.

You’re right, Steve, that time spent reading these student ‘manifestos’ is not wasted, no matter how juvenile and jejune they may be. They are revealing.

Having said that, there is a question of how much the assemblers of these documents really grasp the ponderous abstractions they’re trying to capture and then unload in print. As I read this letter, I could pretty much pick out, phrase by phrase, which bits may have been written by the students themselves, and which were clumsily-inserted ideology transplants from the stuff they’re reading in their Identity Studies courses.

BTW, I think BLM and their intersectional brethren/sistren/xitthren have found a new slogan to chant, i.e. a slight modification of one of the more euphonious lines in this letter:

‘Our praxis is focused on not allowing your anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which you do not have the right to!’

BTW BTW, what’s with the 4:07 deadline timing? Is there something about those numbers only the Woke can ascertain?

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Can someone explain how colleges work, regarding students engaging in side-issues not relevant to their school work? In my day, if I threw a dinner roll in the school cafeteria and hit someone in the head, I could be suspended. If I did it again, another suspension, then again, an expulsion.

It didn’t take much to get booted from my college, and I kept that in mind whenever my imagination took hold, leading me to consider some kind of tomfuckery. I rarely did anything to annoy anyone. I was there to take classes, study, and get on with my life.

Anyway… seems all that’s changed. I see the students acting up at Yale, screaming in the quad at school admins, and I’m astounded the students aren’t expelled. Shouldn’t Yale, or any other university have all the leverage? They can expel a student! They have that power!

Why aren’t students more commonly expelled for this bullshit?

They’re 20-something year old twits! They’re at university to learn. They’re not qualified to “teach” school admins anything about how to conduct university policy. They can suggest, or ask, but this demanding and actively physically kicking up shit shouldn’t be tolerated.

The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.

Pffft… hahaha!

Postmodernism married to “Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!”

Mabye it’s another “Sokal Hoax” and we are being had?

From Jimbo’s Bag of Trivia on said Hoax

[Sokal's hoax article] “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the “morphogenetic field” could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity (a morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair’s aftermath as “a bizarre New Age idea”). Sokal wrote that the concept of “an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being” was “dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook”.

After referring skeptically to the “so-called scientific method”, the article declared that “it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality’” is fundamentally “a social and linguistic construct”. It went on to state that because scientific research is “inherently theory-laden and self-referential”, it “cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities” and that therefore a “liberatory science” and an “emancipatory mathematics”, spurning “the elite caste canon of ‘high science’”, needed to be established for a “postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project”.

Talking about Truth like that makes them sound like Nietzsche, or a thousand other Dead White Males. If white folks made the Enlightenment and scientific racism, they also made the counter-enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and a host of hogwash.

The quote you cite is a paragon of clarity compared to the real gibberish you find in someone like Deleuze. The point is explained in about the closest thing to the king's english you are going to find in academic writing in the humanities today.

Godfrey Elfwick.
If you haven't yet discovered him, look him up on Twitter.
And make sure you find his full-length article in the Guardian titled: ‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist.It's available online. If ever a pc/liberal newspaper deserved to be hoaxed...

The political and intellectual culture in and among the black population suffered severe regression during the period running from about 1955 to about 1978. It has not yet recovered and may take several generations to recover. You see features of that decadence here: the truculent conformism, the identification of knowledge and understanding with the capacity to regurgitate strings of jargon, and the tendency to eschew history in favor of sociological fiction. (Consider the phrase, “The paradox is that Pomona’s past is rooted in domination of marginalized peoples and communities and the student body has a significant population of students from these backgrounds. “. Pomona was founded in 1887 when the black population of Southern California was close to nil; someone needs to remind them the world does not revolve around their ass).

I’ve met African-American women who now live in Europe. Liberated from all those American obsessions and grievances, they didn’t carry on with all the racial crap. Kind souls happy to catch up with a fellow Anglophone for a talk, often a long talk.

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Can someone explain how colleges work, regarding students engaging in side-issues not relevant to their school work? In my day, if I threw a dinner roll in the school cafeteria and hit someone in the head, I could be suspended. If I did it again, another suspension, then again, an expulsion.

It didn't take much to get booted from my college, and I kept that in mind whenever my imagination took hold, leading me to consider some kind of tomfuckery. I rarely did anything to annoy anyone. I was there to take classes, study, and get on with my life.

Anyway... seems all that's changed. I see the students acting up at Yale, screaming in the quad at school admins, and I'm astounded the students aren't expelled. Shouldn't Yale, or any other university have all the leverage? They can expel a student! They have that power!

Why aren't students more commonly expelled for this bullshit?

They're 20-something year old twits! They're at university to learn. They're not qualified to "teach" school admins anything about how to conduct university policy. They can suggest, or ask, but this demanding and actively physically kicking up shit shouldn't be tolerated.

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Because as in the 1960s, the students are merely acting out the agenda of the faculty, or at least a significant part of it.

It’s considered more authentic and effective coming from the students rather than to have the faculty themselves out screaming their heads off in the quad. Certainly more aesthetic.

non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without "hegemonic institutions" (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

This is all pretty clear: simply put, it's a demand for black supremacy. As for the tone of the letter, it's a somewhat amusing mishmash of a juvenile lack of decorum and civility combined with a smattering of SAT words. It sounds like something written by an arrogant 8th grader with the aid of a dictionary and a thesaurus.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

One interesting feature re the Zimmerman-Martin controversy four years back was that when white leftoids talked long enough, what was implicit in their thinking emerged passably clearly; that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

That wasn't just white folks. I remember them all responding to the most artfully prepared justification of Zimmerman's self-defense with something like, "But he was following him!" The black talking heads followed up by relating personal experiences of store employees watching them while they shopped.

The other big fallback was Martin's youth (or youf). That reached its nadir when, last minute, the prosecution sought to add a charge of child abuse.

that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

Yes, and that's just with your garden-variety irritation. Using a derisive word such as "nigger" (which, to be clear, I do not condone) seems to justify - in the minds of many, perhaps even most, black people - the use of violence, sometimes even lethal, in retaliation.

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard - and eminently reasonable - "but even insulting words don't justfy violence. You go to jail."

You're right, Steve, that time spent reading these student 'manifestos' is not wasted, no matter how juvenile and jejune they may be. They are revealing.

Having said that, there is a question of how much the assemblers of these documents really grasp the ponderous abstractions they're trying to capture and then unload in print. As I read this letter, I could pretty much pick out, phrase by phrase, which bits may have been written by the students themselves, and which were clumsily-inserted ideology transplants from the stuff they're reading in their Identity Studies courses.

BTW, I think BLM and their intersectional brethren/sistren/xitthren have found a new slogan to chant, i.e. a slight modification of one of the more euphonious lines in this letter:

'Our praxis is focused on not allowing your anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which you do not have the right to!'

BTW BTW, what's with the 4:07 deadline timing? Is there something about those numbers only the Woke can ascertain?

What a peculiar time of day, 4:07 p.m. Is this some kind of Alt-Right code, like "88 books" and "88 professors"? (And yesterday was the 88th day of the Trump Administration.)

"Also, we demand a revised email sent to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017"

That clinches it: April 20, Hitler's Birthday!

It is not absurd at all to suppose that at least some of the people responsible for this stuff are hard-core secret alt-rightists. I don’t know how true that is, but I don’t think it is absurd. I am fairly confident that a non-trivial fraction of “cishet white men” who hold SJW positions are secret “alt-rightists”. Not all, by any means. But some.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

One interesting feature re the Zimmerman-Martin controversy four years back was that when white leftoids talked long enough, what was implicit in their thinking emerged passably clearly; that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

That wasn’t just white folks. I remember them all responding to the most artfully prepared justification of Zimmerman’s self-defense with something like, “But he was following him!” The black talking heads followed up by relating personal experiences of store employees watching them while they shopped.

The other big fallback was Martin’s youth (or youf). That reached its nadir when, last minute, the prosecution sought to add a charge of child abuse.

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Can someone explain how colleges work, regarding students engaging in side-issues not relevant to their school work? In my day, if I threw a dinner roll in the school cafeteria and hit someone in the head, I could be suspended. If I did it again, another suspension, then again, an expulsion.

It didn't take much to get booted from my college, and I kept that in mind whenever my imagination took hold, leading me to consider some kind of tomfuckery. I rarely did anything to annoy anyone. I was there to take classes, study, and get on with my life.

Anyway... seems all that's changed. I see the students acting up at Yale, screaming in the quad at school admins, and I'm astounded the students aren't expelled. Shouldn't Yale, or any other university have all the leverage? They can expel a student! They have that power!

Why aren't students more commonly expelled for this bullshit?

They're 20-something year old twits! They're at university to learn. They're not qualified to "teach" school admins anything about how to conduct university policy. They can suggest, or ask, but this demanding and actively physically kicking up shit shouldn't be tolerated.

The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.

Pffft... hahaha!

Postmodernism married to "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"

Mabye it's another "Sokal Hoax" and we are being had?

From Jimbo's Bag of Trivia on said Hoax

[Sokal's hoax article] "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the "morphogenetic field" could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity (a morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea"). Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook".

After referring skeptically to the "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality'" is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct". It went on to state that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential", it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities" and that therefore a "liberatory science" and an "emancipatory mathematics", spurning "the elite caste canon of 'high science'", needed to be established for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project".

Talking about Truth like that makes them sound like Nietzsche, or a thousand other Dead White Males. If white folks made the Enlightenment and scientific racism, they also made the counter-enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and a host of hogwash.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

One interesting feature re the Zimmerman-Martin controversy four years back was that when white leftoids talked long enough, what was implicit in their thinking emerged passably clearly; that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

Yes, and that’s just with your garden-variety irritation. Using a derisive word such as “nigger” (which, to be clear, I do not condone) seems to justify – in the minds of many, perhaps even most, black people – the use of violence, sometimes even lethal, in retaliation.

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard – and eminently reasonable – “but even insulting words don’t justfy violence. You go to jail.”

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard – and eminently reasonable – “but even insulting words don’t justfy violence. You go to jail.”

Oh, that’s easy. We’re all the same under the skin, remember? Discrimination targets black bodies, not black souls. How could anyone choose to discriminate against a beautiful black soul, when black souls are indistinguishable from white souls, other than the fact that white souls are evil, and therefore discriminate against black bodies, which makes black souls seem different, especially when perceived by evil white souls, even though black souls are exactly the same and only an evil white soul would think otherwise.

I think this is a parody. It has even more jargon than normal academic SJW babble, and the “by 4:07pm” is just bizarre. Demanding student newspaper editors be disciplined also seems to veer into parody.

I wonder what the Univ. head replied? You know he got that email out on time.
“Almost done here,hello,is that the chapel bell? Miss Jenkins,what time is it? 4 o’clock goddammit!”
I imagine it would be a comical farce loaded with the same bullshit as the students’ letter,except he’d try and find a little wiggle room to sort of imply that maybe the oppressed darlings could stand a bit of actual discussion.
“I know the pain you must feel,being marginalized and all,the way you straddle the intersection of oppression. Perhaps if we hired some diversity coordinators…I know you are not impervious to pain…neither am I…”

I think “black bodies” comes from the Foucault/”seeing like a state” idea that the state can “see” only bodies and the black body in particular was subjected to state procedures of classification like “redlining” that maintained the structure of racially (bodily) coded domination, etc. Foucault traces this back to Descartes which is even further back than FHA policies of the 1930s. And beneath these social constructions is the black body, which maintains the solidarity of a multitude which is not male or straight or female or endowed with a soul or other humanistic hoo-haw. I think that’s the idea though I’ve never been able to read more than few pages of Foucault, so I could be wrong. Foucault was pretty much required reading in college twenty years ago so now it seems like common sense to a large number of TNC’s college educated readers.

Recalling my own college days in the 1970s and a couple of lefties I knew, it is likely one guy at Harvey Mudd drafted this, with a couple of others (at the most) looking over his shoulder, while the rest of the radicals in the room were either getting high, or on their smartphones, texting or watching Netflix. The screed would have been read aloud, to murmurs of general distracted approval from a small group. The majority of those outside the room would have been busy going off to chem lab, calculus, network analysis or some such. And some in the room would have drifted out similarly, during the drafting and typing.

College radical life.

But in our times, after such drivel is emailed or posted, it is taken Very.Seriously.Indeed.

David Oxtoby should have ignored it, or laughed at its obvious flaws.

One episode of high profile series of expulsions at a few top colleges will put an end to this behavior for a generation. The Sixties radical types mostly genuinely turned their backs on the system and were unafraid to buck it, the example of Jerry Rubin’s later career notwithstanding.

By contrast, today’s crowd is terrified of losing access and entree into the Establishment. The threat of expulsion from college will work.

Recalling my own college days in the 1970s and a couple of lefties I knew, it is likely one guy at Harvey Mudd drafted this, with a couple of others (at the most) looking over his shoulder, while the rest of the radicals in the room were either getting high, or on their smartphones, texting or watching Netflix.

This twelve paragraph response to David Oxtoby's two paragraphs is very well written and doesn't skip a beat. Twelve to two is out of wack, but these aggrieved radical black students just cannot help themselves. They are on fire! ! Lets give credit to the hi IQ black SJWs who wrote it. (or did they bring in a white ringer, ya think!?) My guess is it was written by three of them. A main writer and two helpers.

As on topic as it ever could be, I would like to observe that the black nut that popped the old guy in Cleveland had less skull above his eyes in proportion to the amount of face he had below them than anyone I’ve ever seen. I looked at google images of “bald men” and it wasn’t until one of them was illustrating microcephaly that I saw anything comparable.

I remember being told in high school art class that the eyes go in the middle of the skull. On most people that seems about right, maybe a little generous on the cranial capacity.

Well hush my mouth!
I made the error of supposing that the "which" clause related to the main verb "legitimized", by reading the clause as "you do not have the right to (do) that". I now see that it could be read in that way, but that the syntax more likely suggests that it relates back to one of the nouns in the sentence. Either
You do not have the right to our praxis.
or
You do not have the right to your anti-black platform.
or
You do not have the right to an audience.

If it were a poem, or a piece of Shakesperean dialogue, it could of course carry all four meanings simultaneously.

So not "plain English" after all. And I could even be mistaken about the camera.

It is not absurd at all to suppose that at least some of the people responsible for this stuff are hard-core secret alt-rightists. I don't know how true that is, but I don't think it is absurd. I am fairly confident that a non-trivial fraction of "cishet white men" who hold SJW positions are secret "alt-rightists". Not all, by any means. But some.

It is not absurd at all to suppose that at least some of the people responsible for this stuff are hard-core secret alt-rightists.

A lot of English names with”by” at the end of them come from the Viking invaders who ruled parts of England and refers to a farm. It was originally Old Norse býr “farm or settlement.” Appleby is another name like this for example.

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Can someone explain how colleges work, regarding students engaging in side-issues not relevant to their school work? In my day, if I threw a dinner roll in the school cafeteria and hit someone in the head, I could be suspended. If I did it again, another suspension, then again, an expulsion.

It didn't take much to get booted from my college, and I kept that in mind whenever my imagination took hold, leading me to consider some kind of tomfuckery. I rarely did anything to annoy anyone. I was there to take classes, study, and get on with my life.

Anyway... seems all that's changed. I see the students acting up at Yale, screaming in the quad at school admins, and I'm astounded the students aren't expelled. Shouldn't Yale, or any other university have all the leverage? They can expel a student! They have that power!

Why aren't students more commonly expelled for this bullshit?

They're 20-something year old twits! They're at university to learn. They're not qualified to "teach" school admins anything about how to conduct university policy. They can suggest, or ask, but this demanding and actively physically kicking up shit shouldn't be tolerated.

Why would a college expel kids for following explicit institutions given by their faculty?

Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies….

This writing is unacceptable from a reasonably bright student in high school; it is beyond the pale for an undergraduate, especially in its context as an (ostensibly) thoughtful, vetted, public statement meant to be clear and survive scrutiny. A writer who actually had any business attending college might have written something like:

This school, like this nation, was founded upon the oppression and degradation of enslaved people….

Mind you, the sentence remains a falsehood (nothing in California, and no school, university, or college anywhere, so far as I know, was ever founded upon marginalising anyone…).

A: Let’s establish a university in Athens!

B: Capital idea! Bright young men from all over Georgia can go there to receive an education.

A: No no! You’ve missed the point. It will be founded to marginalise the stupid by hurting their feelings when they are denied admission!

And that, friends, is the story of the founding of the nation’s oldest public university in a nutshell.

My example of a better construction (which I composed and transcribed simultaneously, in about ten seconds) is more concise and less confusing.

• It dramatically reduces unnecessary verbiage.

• It eliminates the hackneyed construction “as well as many others including…” which reads like a six-year-old child’s attempts to implement stream-of-consciousness techniques better left to masters like Hemingway and Joyce.

• It omits needlessly nebulous terms like “institution” and “marginalised,” substituting concrete terms to better convey meaning. (If the authors did not indeed mean to explicitly cite slavery – possible, since even morons like them presumably know slavery was never practiced in California – then “disenfranchised” or even “powerless” are better words, since they actually convey something specific.)

The rest of the writing is equally atrocious and could also very easily be improved by any competent writer. The instruments these blacks themselves compose to assert they deserve an education betray their ineducability.

Were I the college’s president, the only response I would offer to this tripe is a free copy of Lanham’s Revising Prose placed in the students’ mailboxes, allowing my gift to speak for itself, like so many Tic-Tacs to a man suffering halitosis.

'Our praxis is focused on not allowing your anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which you do not have the right to!'

Which they do not have a right to what?

"which they do not have a right to legitimize in front of an audience". Whassup man? Can't you understand plain English?

And before you ask, a praxis is obviously some kind of camera. Probably the Praxis BS21T.

Well hush my mouth!
I made the error of supposing that the “which” clause related to the main verb “legitimized”, by reading the clause as “you do not have the right to (do) that”. I now see that it could be read in that way, but that the syntax more likely suggests that it relates back to one of the nouns in the sentence. Either
You do not have the right to our praxis.
or
You do not have the right to your anti-black platform.
or
You do not have the right to an audience.

If it were a poem, or a piece of Shakesperean dialogue, it could of course carry all four meanings simultaneously.

So not “plain English” after all. And I could even be mistaken about the camera.

We’re going through a temporary transitional period while colleges dumb down their curricula to the point where someone with an IQ of 85 can graduate summa cum laude. Until that ideal is achieved, more campus turmoil should be expected.

““In the W.E.B. Du Bois era, black folk had souls. Now, in the Teh-Genius Coates age, they just have bodies. What happened?””

The “bodies” thing which as Steve notes is a verbal tic of Genius T. Coates, is postmodern academic cant which originates with French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Since he’s an autodidact whose tastes run to middlebrow history like “Battle Cry of Freedom”, I doubt if he’s read much if any Foucault in the original, but the influence of the bald-headed postmodern perv is omnipresent in the liberal academic circles that coddle Coates and have him thinking he’s the second coming of James Baldwin.

The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.

Pffft... hahaha!

Postmodernism married to "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"

Mabye it's another "Sokal Hoax" and we are being had?

From Jimbo's Bag of Trivia on said Hoax

[Sokal's hoax article] "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the "morphogenetic field" could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity (a morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea"). Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook".

After referring skeptically to the "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality'" is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct". It went on to state that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential", it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities" and that therefore a "liberatory science" and an "emancipatory mathematics", spurning "the elite caste canon of 'high science'", needed to be established for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project".

The quote you cite is a paragon of clarity compared to the real gibberish you find in someone like Deleuze. The point is explained in about the closest thing to the king’s english you are going to find in academic writing in the humanities today.

You're right, Steve, that time spent reading these student 'manifestos' is not wasted, no matter how juvenile and jejune they may be. They are revealing.

Having said that, there is a question of how much the assemblers of these documents really grasp the ponderous abstractions they're trying to capture and then unload in print. As I read this letter, I could pretty much pick out, phrase by phrase, which bits may have been written by the students themselves, and which were clumsily-inserted ideology transplants from the stuff they're reading in their Identity Studies courses.

BTW, I think BLM and their intersectional brethren/sistren/xitthren have found a new slogan to chant, i.e. a slight modification of one of the more euphonious lines in this letter:

'Our praxis is focused on not allowing your anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which you do not have the right to!'

BTW BTW, what's with the 4:07 deadline timing? Is there something about those numbers only the Woke can ascertain?

BTW, what’s with the 4:07 deadline timing?

If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.

Recalling my own college days in the 1970s and a couple of lefties I knew, it is likely one guy at Harvey Mudd drafted this, with a couple of others (at the most) looking over his shoulder, while the rest of the radicals in the room were either getting high, or on their smartphones, texting or watching Netflix. The screed would have been read aloud, to murmurs of general distracted approval from a small group. The majority of those outside the room would have been busy going off to chem lab, calculus, network analysis or some such. And some in the room would have drifted out similarly, during the drafting and typing.

College radical life.

But in our times, after such drivel is emailed or posted, it is taken Very.Seriously.Indeed.

David Oxtoby should have ignored it, or laughed at its obvious flaws.

One episode of high profile series of expulsions at a few top colleges will put an end to this behavior for a generation. The Sixties radical types mostly genuinely turned their backs on the system and were unafraid to buck it, the example of Jerry Rubin's later career notwithstanding.

By contrast, today's crowd is terrified of losing access and entree into the Establishment. The threat of expulsion from college will work.

Recalling my own college days in the 1970s and a couple of lefties I knew, it is likely one guy at Harvey Mudd drafted this, with a couple of others (at the most) looking over his shoulder, while the rest of the radicals in the room were either getting high, or on their smartphones, texting or watching Netflix.

This twelve paragraph response to David Oxtoby’s two paragraphs is very well written and doesn’t skip a beat. Twelve to two is out of wack, but these aggrieved radical black students just cannot help themselves. They are on fire! ! Lets give credit to the hi IQ black SJWs who wrote it. (or did they bring in a white ringer, ya think!?) My guess is it was written by three of them. A main writer and two helpers.

The letter is filled with academic pseudo-intellectual jargon ("... straddle the intersection of marginalized identities"), with virtually no sentence written in the Queen's English . Your guess may be right, and I would suspect that "main writer" is one of the humanities professors.

This is a parody/hoax isn't it? Like what that Eldrick guy does. It breaks down a bit at the end with the 4:07 p.m. deadlines and the demand that student paper people receive threats and hate mail.

that Eldrick guy

Godfrey Elfwick.
If you haven’t yet discovered him, look him up on Twitter.
And make sure you find his full-length article in the Guardian titled: ‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist.
It’s available online. If ever a pc/liberal newspaper deserved to be hoaxed…

His dad, John C. Oxtoby, was an eminent mathematician, best known for work done in collaboration with Stan Ulam, but impressive in his own right. My own thesis work was related to many of the theorems on non-measurable sets in chapter 5 of his textbook "Measure and Category" (I proved some results about when Fubini's theorem can be extended to non-measurable sets).

Provided that the Claremont Independent releases the identity of students involved with this letter and such students begin to receive threats and hate mail, we demand that this institution and its constituents take legal action against members of the Claremont Independent involved with the editing and publication process as well as disciplinary action, such as expulsion on the grounds of endangering the wellbeing of others.

The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces...

Maybe they are into something here. Indeed, what is more important, truth or wellbeing? Which is end and which is means?

So many strange modifiers in this statement such as “open spaces.” Is there some inherent ability to do better in closed spaces, confined spaces or hidden spaces? Like a prison… It’s clearly a sort of humanities buzz phrase that makes no sense in this context. That is a pretty good summary of this whole piece – lots of academic word construction with little connection to the subject at large amid little real substance.

Why not just say “this speaker draws people to believe that blacks are more dangerous and less intelligent. It makes stereotypes which encourage discrimination. We disagree with her opinions. Here is our reasoning.”

Even Caltech has fallen. It capitulated in 2015 with the creation of the post of Chief Diversity Officer, in response to the Federal Government's threat to use Title IX to punish schools with too few students from the right marginalized groups. (The CDO's gender, academic field, ethnic background, and probable sexual orientation are all exactly as you might guess.)

Tech schools are especially vulnerable to such threats, because the minimum bar is so high. An affirmative-action admit who might skate by with gentleman's Cs in easy courses at Harvard would get crushed by Caltech's rigorous Core Curriculum.

Black snow flakes. Black supremacy. Made possible by student loans. Some of these dick heads will manage to make a living out of it by remaining permanently in academia. But most of them will end up out here in the real world where spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you nothing. I am acquainted with many working class (employed) black men and women. They do what they have to do to pay the rent. Just like us white guys.

I agree about jobs in labor and trades, but spouting nonsense and issuing demands is quite lucrative for dickheads outside academia as well, in corporate contexts.

The female project manager at Google, Inc.; the vice president for human resources at Apple, Inc.; the token Negro partner at Latham Watkins; the special liason for diversity at Boeing: all dickheads full of nonsense, most making substantially more money than those of us in these outfits actually doing productive work.

we have [no?] more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives)

So Trump was right, these folks really are low energy.

Putting aside the atrocious grammar, how did the new new leftism become associated (in their own minds) with laziness? The old left was all about “struggle” – no amount of struggle was too much in order to bring about the Revolution. Day and night struggle! But now the left “doesn’t have to educate you”, they don’t want to engage in “emotional labor”, they have “no more energy” to spend on you, etc. How did this come to be, for such young people who are supposed to be all about energy?

As a Nietzschean, I’m perfectly OK with the idea that “Truth” is a big myth. I’m also OK that it resulted in racism, imperialism, and the USA. That’s a good thing, right? What I don’t get is, if “Truth” is a myth, WTF should I care about “racism” etc.?

The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces...

Maybe they are into something here. Indeed, what is more important, truth or wellbeing? Which is end and which is means?

What is the meaning of life? The sound of one hand clapping?

Putting aside philosophical musings, I would say that truth is a precondition to wellbeing. For example, if the truth is that various diseases are caused by viruses, bacteria, etc. and you prefer your own “truth” that diseases are caused by evil spirits or you deny that such a thing as “truth” even exists and refuse to be vaccinated or to observe the rules of sanitation, they this will ENDANGER your own well being (and especially that of your children). Our whole modern existence is predicated on a search for “truth” – the true laws of physics, biology, etc.

PS what does “our abilities to exist in open spaces” even mean? One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn’t quite make sense.

One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn’t quite make sense.

Obama writ large. I took a pass on listening to Obama after his first inaugural--which I listened to out of a civic responsibility. His earlier, and highly praised, speech on race--and rebuttal of Rev. Wright--that Obama delivered in Philadelphia was the epitome of an empty suit, i.e. just words.

Reading Obama's speeches revealed them to be empty of substance as they were cliché laden.

One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn’t quite make sense.

PJ O'Rourke penned an article on presidential candidates' rhetoric in 1984, making use of the text of 18 speeches given by Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, and Ronald Reagan. He begged off Jesse Jackson. The reason he gave was (1) Jackson does not ordinarily use a prepared text and (2) he relies much more heavily on gesture, nuance, and audience response. A written transcript of Jackson loses important content.

That's not the problem with BO, whose public remarks are commonly a mix of flapdoodle and gamesmanship. BO's cultural background is a mix of Honolulu haolie and second-hand red-diaper baby. The repellent and useless features of his speaking are not specifically black .

Now, my wager is if you were looking at old speeches by Bayard Rustin or Whitney Young, you would not see the phenomenon to which you're referring.

What a peculiar time of day, 4:07 p.m. Is this some kind of Alt-Right code, like "88 books" and "88 professors"? (And yesterday was the 88th day of the Trump Administration.)

"Also, we demand a revised email sent to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017"

That clinches it: April 20, Hitler's Birthday!

This is part of what Tom Wolfe called mau-mauing the flak catchers. You try to throw the bureaucrats off balance by making absurd unreasonable (including unreasonably specific) demands. This is like rock stars asking for the brown M&Ms to be taken out of the candy in their dressing rooms – it’s just a way of demonstrating your power.

non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without "hegemonic institutions" (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

This is all pretty clear: simply put, it's a demand for black supremacy. As for the tone of the letter, it's a somewhat amusing mishmash of a juvenile lack of decorum and civility combined with a smattering of SAT words. It sounds like something written by an arrogant 8th grader with the aid of a dictionary and a thesaurus.

non-Black individuals do not have the right to prescribe how Black people respond to anti-Blackness.

Translation: black people have the right to beat up non-black people, without “hegemonic institutions” (e.g. law enforcement) interfering with the said right.

The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces...

Maybe they are into something here. Indeed, what is more important, truth or wellbeing? Which is end and which is means?

Its an interesting argument insofar as society goes – wellbeing may be a more useful goal than truth for a society, for example, the notion that the belief in an all seeing God is valuable even there isn’t one.

For an university, however, it is supposed to be an institution of truth-seeking.

I've met African-American women who now live in Europe. Liberated from all those American obsessions and grievances, they didn't carry on with all the racial crap. Kind souls happy to catch up with a fellow Anglophone for a talk, often a long talk.

Gap years are well-established in various countries. The US could use that concept to encourage some maturation and life experience prior to taking the leap into college, or into other aspects of adulthood. Many young people benefit from the structure and discipline of a few years in the military, while others would do better elsewhere. Paying for that is another story.

that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

Yes, and that's just with your garden-variety irritation. Using a derisive word such as "nigger" (which, to be clear, I do not condone) seems to justify - in the minds of many, perhaps even most, black people - the use of violence, sometimes even lethal, in retaliation.

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard - and eminently reasonable - "but even insulting words don't justfy violence. You go to jail."

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard – and eminently reasonable – “but even insulting words don’t justfy violence. You go to jail.”

Black snow flakes. Black supremacy. Made possible by student loans. Some of these dick heads will manage to make a living out of it by remaining permanently in academia. But most of them will end up out here in the real world where spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you nothing. I am acquainted with many working class (employed) black men and women. They do what they have to do to pay the rent. Just like us white guys.

Made possible by student loans. Some of these dick heads will manage to make a living out of it by remaining permanently in academia.

Well that’s kind of the whole point of the non-professional PhD, isn’t it?

There is no such thing as a 'professional' 'PhD'. That's a designation for research degrees, whether the subject is academic or vocational (though somtimes DSc is preferred) The professional doctorates (some quite novel) are the MD, the DDS, the DO, the DC, the DPT, the OD, the DPM, the PsyD, the PharmD. the AuD, the DNP, the EdD, and the JD.

I think the references to “black bodies” give us insight to how liberals see blacks. They’re passive objects who have things done to them by white people. Depending on white people’s level of racism, they either succeed or fail, get mass incarcerated or shot up by the police. The whims, insecurities, and power seeking of white people are all that matter, since the idea that blacks are responsible for their own failures is unthinkable.

“Soul” implies agency. Referring to someone as a “body” indicates the opposite.

I think this is a parody. It has even more jargon than normal academic SJW babble, and the "by 4:07pm" is just bizarre. Demanding student newspaper editors be disciplined also seems to veer into parody.

It isn’t funny enough to be a parody, it’s completely humourless and earnestly sincere in it’s illogical demands that it attempts to claim are logical. BTW, Oxtoby is retiring this June.

I've met African-American women who now live in Europe. Liberated from all those American obsessions and grievances, they didn't carry on with all the racial crap. Kind souls happy to catch up with a fellow Anglophone for a talk, often a long talk.

Tacitus, Have they shed the finger waggling head bobbing mannerism that so many black women use when agitated?

You're right, Steve, that time spent reading these student 'manifestos' is not wasted, no matter how juvenile and jejune they may be. They are revealing.

Having said that, there is a question of how much the assemblers of these documents really grasp the ponderous abstractions they're trying to capture and then unload in print. As I read this letter, I could pretty much pick out, phrase by phrase, which bits may have been written by the students themselves, and which were clumsily-inserted ideology transplants from the stuff they're reading in their Identity Studies courses.

BTW, I think BLM and their intersectional brethren/sistren/xitthren have found a new slogan to chant, i.e. a slight modification of one of the more euphonious lines in this letter:

'Our praxis is focused on not allowing your anti-Black platform to be legitimized in front of an audience, which you do not have the right to!'

BTW BTW, what's with the 4:07 deadline timing? Is there something about those numbers only the Woke can ascertain?

Black people, students included, have been making unrealistic demands since the sixties. This all stems from their inability or unwillingness to assume responsibility for their own actions or inactions. Merely responding to their demands emboldens them. It is a Mobius band of grievance.

Black people, students included, have been making unrealistic demands since the sixties. This all stems from their inability or unwillingness to assume responsibility for their own actions or inactions.

By the way, I have a dull anecdote involving Pomona College president David Oxtoby.

Matter of fact it was a great story! I would never have guessed the origin of the name. Wikipedia covers six Oxtobys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxtoby

At David Oxtoby's Wikipedia entry everyone in his family has boring Anglo names
Born David William Oxtoby
October 17, 1951
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Spouse(s) Claire B. Oxtoby
Children Mary Christina, John, Laura
Parents John C. Oxtoby, Jean Oxtoby

His dad, John C. Oxtoby, was an eminent mathematician, best known for work done in collaboration with Stan Ulam, but impressive in his own right. My own thesis work was related to many of the theorems on non-measurable sets in chapter 5 of his textbook “Measure and Category” (I proved some results about when Fubini’s theorem can be extended to non-measurable sets).

https://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Oxtoby&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=mozilla-20 Amazon has books written by various Oxtobys including David and John C. Oxtoby who figured in your thesis.

Public discourse in modern America is largely defined and controlled by a consciousness created by elite media -- and in that context, Whites have been for decades little more than scapegoats -- what's changing now is that more Whites are recognizing that fact.

https://twitter.com/occdissent/status/854356140444045313

Define Black Identity. Define Hispanic Identity. You don’t care about definitions. You just think one group is illegitimate.

The fact is that ‘Identity’, in these cases is moronic. We identify ‘ford’ with vehicles, the AF with planes, etc. We cannot identify certain groups with a race. Let me give you an example. I know black Jews, red headed Jews, brown Jews, Scandinavian type Jews, etc. SO are Jews a race or a creed? After reading Isabella of Spain, I found out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism! So taking this example, obviously Talmudist were doing same in other lands, i.e. Poland, Germany, France, Russia, and even in the Mohamedan lands, of the Ottoman Empire, etc.

So with blacks. I noticed different features of the black group of humanity. Slender faced, round ugly faced, and in between. Short, tall, etc.

with the so called “Hispanic’. There are Scandinavian type Hispanics, brown Hispanics, black Hispanics, etc. So, no! there is not an ‘Identity’ of Hispanics. Argentina is the whitest nation in the Americas, and yet, are considered Hispanics!. So there you have it. At the end of the day, the three groups in humanity, Pale, black, and mongoloid, still has a valid point.

out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism. So they didn't actually think there was anything wrong with forced conversion per se, only with being on the receiving end of it. This is like the modern Left - they really have no objection on general principle to all sorts of oppression, they just want to be the ones who dole it out rather than the ones being oppressed.

Putting aside philosophical musings, I would say that truth is a precondition to wellbeing. For example, if the truth is that various diseases are caused by viruses, bacteria, etc. and you prefer your own "truth" that diseases are caused by evil spirits or you deny that such a thing as "truth" even exists and refuse to be vaccinated or to observe the rules of sanitation, they this will ENDANGER your own well being (and especially that of your children). Our whole modern existence is predicated on a search for "truth" - the true laws of physics, biology, etc.

PS what does "our abilities to exist in open spaces" even mean? One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn't quite make sense.

One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn’t quite make sense.

Obama writ large. I took a pass on listening to Obama after his first inaugural–which I listened to out of a civic responsibility. His earlier, and highly praised, speech on race–and rebuttal of Rev. Wright–that Obama delivered in Philadelphia was the epitome of an empty suit, i.e. just words.

Reading Obama’s speeches revealed them to be empty of substance as they were cliché laden.

that blacks have a franchise to beat up people who irritate them, a franchise which abrogates any right of self-defense.

Yes, and that's just with your garden-variety irritation. Using a derisive word such as "nigger" (which, to be clear, I do not condone) seems to justify - in the minds of many, perhaps even most, black people - the use of violence, sometimes even lethal, in retaliation.

Meanwhile if people of any other ethnicity, be they white, Hispanics, Asian, Native American, what have you, were to use the same line of reasoning, they get the standard - and eminently reasonable - "but even insulting words don't justfy violence. You go to jail."

Calling someone that word or any other number of insulting words is what is known as “fighting words,” meaning anyone who responds violently has reduced legal culpability.

Black snow flakes. Black supremacy. Made possible by student loans. Some of these dick heads will manage to make a living out of it by remaining permanently in academia. But most of them will end up out here in the real world where spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you nothing. I am acquainted with many working class (employed) black men and women. They do what they have to do to pay the rent. Just like us white guys.

I agree about jobs in labor and trades, but spouting nonsense and issuing demands is quite lucrative for dickheads outside academia as well, in corporate contexts.

The female project manager at Google, Inc.; the vice president for human resources at Apple, Inc.; the token Negro partner at Latham Watkins; the special liason for diversity at Boeing: all dickheads full of nonsense, most making substantially more money than those of us in these outfits actually doing productive work.

Service, labor and trades are all I know. Spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you fired and makes you the object of humor and derision. I have a niece with a degree in psychology. She is making salads at Whole Foods and happy not to be working in day care or nursing homes or driving for uber.

Your point is well taken. The bs spills over into corporate culture. But for those of us who never went to college it's hard to take this stuff seriously.

Why not just ignore the letter, and expel anyone caught kicking up shit?

Can someone explain how colleges work, regarding students engaging in side-issues not relevant to their school work? In my day, if I threw a dinner roll in the school cafeteria and hit someone in the head, I could be suspended. If I did it again, another suspension, then again, an expulsion.

It didn't take much to get booted from my college, and I kept that in mind whenever my imagination took hold, leading me to consider some kind of tomfuckery. I rarely did anything to annoy anyone. I was there to take classes, study, and get on with my life.

Anyway... seems all that's changed. I see the students acting up at Yale, screaming in the quad at school admins, and I'm astounded the students aren't expelled. Shouldn't Yale, or any other university have all the leverage? They can expel a student! They have that power!

Why aren't students more commonly expelled for this bullshit?

They're 20-something year old twits! They're at university to learn. They're not qualified to "teach" school admins anything about how to conduct university policy. They can suggest, or ask, but this demanding and actively physically kicking up shit shouldn't be tolerated.

Yeah the Yale video shocked me. That girl should have been immediately removed from the dorms.

Made possible by student loans. Some of these dick heads will manage to make a living out of it by remaining permanently in academia.

Well that's kind of the whole point of the non-professional PhD, isn't it?

There is no such thing as a ‘professional’ ‘PhD’. That’s a designation for research degrees, whether the subject is academic or vocational (though somtimes DSc is preferred) The professional doctorates (some quite novel) are the MD, the DDS, the DO, the DC, the DPT, the OD, the DPM, the PsyD, the PharmD. the AuD, the DNP, the EdD, and the JD.

Putting aside philosophical musings, I would say that truth is a precondition to wellbeing. For example, if the truth is that various diseases are caused by viruses, bacteria, etc. and you prefer your own "truth" that diseases are caused by evil spirits or you deny that such a thing as "truth" even exists and refuse to be vaccinated or to observe the rules of sanitation, they this will ENDANGER your own well being (and especially that of your children). Our whole modern existence is predicated on a search for "truth" - the true laws of physics, biology, etc.

PS what does "our abilities to exist in open spaces" even mean? One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn't quite make sense.

One characteristic of black rhetoric is that it often sounds good as spoken words, but once you write it down and try to parse it, it doesn’t quite make sense.

PJ O’Rourke penned an article on presidential candidates’ rhetoric in 1984, making use of the text of 18 speeches given by Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, and Ronald Reagan. He begged off Jesse Jackson. The reason he gave was (1) Jackson does not ordinarily use a prepared text and (2) he relies much more heavily on gesture, nuance, and audience response. A written transcript of Jackson loses important content.

That’s not the problem with BO, whose public remarks are commonly a mix of flapdoodle and gamesmanship. BO’s cultural background is a mix of Honolulu haolie and second-hand red-diaper baby. The repellent and useless features of his speaking are not specifically black .

Now, my wager is if you were looking at old speeches by Bayard Rustin or Whitney Young, you would not see the phenomenon to which you’re referring.

Recalling my own college days in the 1970s and a couple of lefties I knew, it is likely one guy at Harvey Mudd drafted this, with a couple of others (at the most) looking over his shoulder, while the rest of the radicals in the room were either getting high, or on their smartphones, texting or watching Netflix.

This twelve paragraph response to David Oxtoby's two paragraphs is very well written and doesn't skip a beat. Twelve to two is out of wack, but these aggrieved radical black students just cannot help themselves. They are on fire! ! Lets give credit to the hi IQ black SJWs who wrote it. (or did they bring in a white ringer, ya think!?) My guess is it was written by three of them. A main writer and two helpers.

The letter is filled with academic pseudo-intellectual jargon (“… straddle the intersection of marginalized identities”), with virtually no sentence written in the Queen’s English . Your guess may be right, and I would suspect that “main writer” is one of the humanities professors.

Black people, students included, have been making unrealistic demands since the sixties. This all stems from their inability or unwillingness to assume responsibility for their own actions or inactions. Merely responding to their demands emboldens them. It is a Mobius band of grievance.

Black people, students included, have been making unrealistic demands since the sixties. This all stems from their inability or unwillingness to assume responsibility for their own actions or inactions.

Define Black Identity. Define Hispanic Identity. You don't care about definitions. You just think one group is illegitimate.

The fact is that 'Identity', in these cases is moronic. We identify 'ford' with vehicles, the AF with planes, etc. We cannot identify certain groups with a race. Let me give you an example. I know black Jews, red headed Jews, brown Jews, Scandinavian type Jews, etc. SO are Jews a race or a creed? After reading Isabella of Spain, I found out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism! So taking this example, obviously Talmudist were doing same in other lands, i.e. Poland, Germany, France, Russia, and even in the Mohamedan lands, of the Ottoman Empire, etc.

So with blacks. I noticed different features of the black group of humanity. Slender faced, round ugly faced, and in between. Short, tall, etc.

with the so called "Hispanic'. There are Scandinavian type Hispanics, brown Hispanics, black Hispanics, etc. So, no! there is not an 'Identity' of Hispanics. Argentina is the whitest nation in the Americas, and yet, are considered Hispanics!. So there you have it. At the end of the day, the three groups in humanity, Pale, black, and mongoloid, still has a valid point.

out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism. So they didn’t actually think there was anything wrong with forced conversion per se, only with being on the receiving end of it. This is like the modern Left – they really have no objection on general principle to all sorts of oppression, they just want to be the ones who dole it out rather than the ones being oppressed.

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism.

Umm, no. The Spanish government told them they had that become Catholic as a condition for remaining in Spain. Considering the era it was not an unreasonable request, especially (though not only) not from the point of view of statecraft, and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified, however much we may regret the excessive overlap between Church and state in the particular Inquisitions there. Catholic Spain was not even remotely comparable to the monolithic tyranny and barbarian apologetics of the latter-day intersectional left - nothing in Western civilization has ever been except potentially the Nazi regime and that doesn't count as it was effervescent and had plenty of establishment opponents - , no matter how much it may be to the disliking of a number of us here and now.

I think the references to "black bodies" give us insight to how liberals see blacks. They're passive objects who have things done to them by white people. Depending on white people's level of racism, they either succeed or fail, get mass incarcerated or shot up by the police. The whims, insecurities, and power seeking of white people are all that matter, since the idea that blacks are responsible for their own failures is unthinkable.

"Soul" implies agency. Referring to someone as a "body" indicates the opposite.

I think the references to “black bodies” give us insight to how liberals see blacks. They’re passive objects who have things done to them by white people.

Why do I get the impression that all this campus SJW nonsense is part of a scheme by SJW profs, who teach classes of very dubious merit (and who are viewed as intellectual lightweights by their colleagues), to manufacture student strong-arm mobs to go out and harass the college administrators and presidents into giving them tenure, raising their salaries, and creating entire departments that are run by SJW profs? Anybody who knows anything about academic politics (and Machiavelli) has a right to be deeply suspicious of the outcomes of these student protests.

Colleges made a huge shift towards hiring liberal profs in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems to have escaped people that this was caused by the student demands of the 1960s. In the 1960s, liberal profs were a much rarer species, and they went to a lot of trouble to make sure their kind was duplicated in academia by radicalization of the young brains under their care in the 1960s.

College administrators are caught in a vicious circle they can’t get out of until they stop hiring SJW profs and stop letting in students with ‘SJW’ stamped all over their applications.

Liberal professors were common enough that they gave into the ridiculous student radicals' ridiculous demands (often enough), instead of smoking them out or expelling them en masse, as they absolutely would have done had they been little nazis instead commies.

If it's escaped people that the big leftward swing to the era of the PC university--a.k.a. the Long March through the institutions--was caused by the 60s uprisings, that's because victors write history and they want people to think that the ruling intellectual class came to power by force of argument, not force of arms.

Actually, they don't want you to think there's a ruling intellectual class at all. But in case you notice, you should think it's based on Truth and Beauty, not "Up against the wall!"

“Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.”

Is this even real? This has an almost sort of Pythonesque ridiculousness to it. It’s so over-the-top it actually caused me to laugh out loud, having been a longtime reader of Heather MacDonald’s City Journal work.

I mean, is McDonald really ALL those things? What if she’s just a transphobe and not a queerphobe? What if she’s not a classist but an ageist? What if her music listening tastes are rockist?

Whatever the case, I suggested MacDonald start calling herself H-Mac, or perhaps H-Mac from the CJ, just to drive these students totally off their rocker. I’ll leave aside the flawed theory about the “interlocking systems of domination” and why those systems are really the way they are.

A lot of English names with"by" at the end of them come from the Viking invaders who ruled parts of England and refers to a farm. It was originally Old Norse býr "farm or settlement." Appleby is another name like this for example.

Black culture (as opposed to black individuals, who often don’t exhibit the trait ) seems to have a tendency towards the paradigm of omnipotence. Blacks, as a collective, seem to have a strong focus on (and, quite frankly, a fascination with) the idea of one group having dominion over another. Of course, on the surface, black culture seems to decry it. On a deeper, more covert level, however, it embraces it. The dynamics of black interaction – both among people within their culture and with people outside of their culture – is a manifestation of this.

White cultures have certainly shown this tendency in the past – the British Navy (the world’s largest 100+ years ago) had to be larger than the next two largest navies combined – but British omnipotence back then generally seemed more purposeful than pathological, as their empire often helped to build it’s subjected populations into advancing societies, at least in some respects. Even America’s neocons want to “spread democracy” throughout the world, as deluded as that idea may be.

Blacks, on a more visceral level, seem to be drawn more to the idea of “grinding boot heel” omnipotence. They may project and say it’s whites who do this (and in some cases, that’s correct), but white omnipotence usually seems more goal driven, while black omnipotence seems far more psychologically driven. Only white societies with intense socialist leanings (either Nationalist or Globalist) seem to resort to insane levels of repression.

We all hear about the American slavery of 150 years ago from black people today, but very little about the current slavery in Africa that has existed from the civil rights era on. The subtext of this is: “It isn’t so much slavery that’s wrong, but the enslavement of blacks by whites that’s wrong.” Extrapolate this into “The ‘wrongness’ of group domination is contingent on which group is dominating and which group is being dominated.”

Could this be part of the reason why blacks shoot each other so much? (One person should be dominant and the other subservient…or punished.) Why blacks involved in political protest rely on the “call and response” mentality? Why black political thinking is largely monolithic? Why they accept the unprincipled notion that any policy that benefits blacks over others must be (defacto) morally and ethically sound? And, depending on how much they buy into the paradigm, maybe even help explain why blacks largely accepted their centuries of enslavement in the New World, mostly waiting for others to free them?

Enter the idea of free speech. The past 30 or 40 years has seen a style of public discourse on race in society that hasn’t really been discourse at all, but re-education via secularized sermons. In other words, one world view gaining domination over another world view by way of institutionalized social propriety. A very acceptable idea, it seems, to many blacks. So the freedom of speech that lifts up ideas that oppose the current accepted ideas seems to be viewed (by blacks) as “talking back” to one’s superiors. I hear the word “interrupting” sometimes used in this context. If you express views that are contrary to the current leftist views on society, you are “interrupting.”

Black culture (as opposed to black individuals, who often don't exhibit the trait ) seems to have a tendency towards the paradigm of omnipotence. Blacks, as a collective, seem to have a strong focus on (and, quite frankly, a fascination with) the idea of one group having dominion over another. Of course, on the surface, black culture seems to decry it. On a deeper, more covert level, however, it embraces it. The dynamics of black interaction - both among people within their culture and with people outside of their culture - is a manifestation of this.

White cultures have certainly shown this tendency in the past - the British Navy (the world's largest 100+ years ago) had to be larger than the next two largest navies combined - but British omnipotence back then generally seemed more purposeful than pathological, as their empire often helped to build it's subjected populations into advancing societies, at least in some respects. Even America's neocons want to "spread democracy" throughout the world, as deluded as that idea may be.

Blacks, on a more visceral level, seem to be drawn more to the idea of "grinding boot heel" omnipotence. They may project and say it's whites who do this (and in some cases, that's correct), but white omnipotence usually seems more goal driven, while black omnipotence seems far more psychologically driven. Only white societies with intense socialist leanings (either Nationalist or Globalist) seem to resort to insane levels of repression.

We all hear about the American slavery of 150 years ago from black people today, but very little about the current slavery in Africa that has existed from the civil rights era on. The subtext of this is: "It isn't so much slavery that's wrong, but the enslavement of blacks by whites that's wrong." Extrapolate this into "The 'wrongness' of group domination is contingent on which group is dominating and which group is being dominated."

Could this be part of the reason why blacks shoot each other so much? (One person should be dominant and the other subservient...or punished.) Why blacks involved in political protest rely on the "call and response" mentality? Why black political thinking is largely monolithic? Why they accept the unprincipled notion that any policy that benefits blacks over others must be (defacto) morally and ethically sound? And, depending on how much they buy into the paradigm, maybe even help explain why blacks largely accepted their centuries of enslavement in the New World, mostly waiting for others to free them?

Enter the idea of free speech. The past 30 or 40 years has seen a style of public discourse on race in society that hasn't really been discourse at all, but re-education via secularized sermons. In other words, one world view gaining domination over another world view by way of institutionalized social propriety. A very acceptable idea, it seems, to many blacks. So the freedom of speech that lifts up ideas that oppose the current accepted ideas seems to be viewed (by blacks) as "talking back" to one's superiors. I hear the word "interrupting" sometimes used in this context. If you express views that are contrary to the current leftist views on society, you are "interrupting."

I agree about jobs in labor and trades, but spouting nonsense and issuing demands is quite lucrative for dickheads outside academia as well, in corporate contexts.

The female project manager at Google, Inc.; the vice president for human resources at Apple, Inc.; the token Negro partner at Latham Watkins; the special liason for diversity at Boeing: all dickheads full of nonsense, most making substantially more money than those of us in these outfits actually doing productive work.

Service, labor and trades are all I know. Spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you fired and makes you the object of humor and derision. I have a niece with a degree in psychology. She is making salads at Whole Foods and happy not to be working in day care or nursing homes or driving for uber.

Your point is well taken. The bs spills over into corporate culture. But for those of us who never went to college it’s hard to take this stuff seriously.

I'm with you; I'm working like a madman to escape ostensible success and return to honest labor for precisely the reasons you mention (and an opportunity to live in what's left of America, escaping the Hellish, unlivable Gomorrahs and Sodoms one must inhabit to be a part of The Machine).

I recommend to you and anyone else interested Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, which explores the healthier experience of manual work because of, among other reasons, the inability to fake and bullshit skill and knowledge. The toilet flushes, the engine cranks, and so on ... or it doesn't. There are no points for a .ppt slide that pops (whatever the Hell that even means).

Gap years are well-established in various countries. The US could use that concept to encourage some maturation and life experience prior to taking the leap into college, or into other aspects of adulthood. Many young people benefit from the structure and discipline of a few years in the military, while others would do better elsewhere. Paying for that is another story.

out that one of the reasons the Talmudists were kicked out of Spain, was that they circumcised their servants, i.e. slaves and forced them to convert to talmudism

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism. So they didn't actually think there was anything wrong with forced conversion per se, only with being on the receiving end of it. This is like the modern Left - they really have no objection on general principle to all sorts of oppression, they just want to be the ones who dole it out rather than the ones being oppressed.

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism.

Umm, no. The Spanish government told them they had that become Catholic as a condition for remaining in Spain. Considering the era it was not an unreasonable request, especially (though not only) not from the point of view of statecraft, and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified, however much we may regret the excessive overlap between Church and state in the particular Inquisitions there. Catholic Spain was not even remotely comparable to the monolithic tyranny and barbarian apologetics of the latter-day intersectional left – nothing in Western civilization has ever been except potentially the Nazi regime and that doesn’t count as it was effervescent and had plenty of establishment opponents – , no matter how much it may be to the disliking of a number of us here and now.

and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified

What happened was that a lot of the Jewish conversos adopted Catholicism wholeheartedly and were extraordinarily successful (think Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, von Neumann, etc.) and within a couple of generations were doing better than those with fully Catholic backgrounds, which naturally made the latter jealous. So one way to get rid of these people was to falsely accuse them of being "secret" Jews. It had nothing to do with loyalty to any foreign power. To what foreign power would secret Jews have been loyal?

Well hush my mouth!
I made the error of supposing that the "which" clause related to the main verb "legitimized", by reading the clause as "you do not have the right to (do) that". I now see that it could be read in that way, but that the syntax more likely suggests that it relates back to one of the nouns in the sentence. Either
You do not have the right to our praxis.
or
You do not have the right to your anti-black platform.
or
You do not have the right to an audience.

If it were a poem, or a piece of Shakesperean dialogue, it could of course carry all four meanings simultaneously.

So not "plain English" after all. And I could even be mistaken about the camera.

I got the feeling the “which” clause was simply left unfinished. They typed it out to “to,” then paused for a sandwich or bathroom break, and forgot about it.

Why do I get the impression that all this campus SJW nonsense is part of a scheme by SJW profs, who teach classes of very dubious merit (and who are viewed as intellectual lightweights by their colleagues), to manufacture student strong-arm mobs to go out and harass the college administrators and presidents into giving them tenure, raising their salaries, and creating entire departments that are run by SJW profs? Anybody who knows anything about academic politics (and Machiavelli) has a right to be deeply suspicious of the outcomes of these student protests.

Colleges made a huge shift towards hiring liberal profs in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems to have escaped people that this was caused by the student demands of the 1960s. In the 1960s, liberal profs were a much rarer species, and they went to a lot of trouble to make sure their kind was duplicated in academia by radicalization of the young brains under their care in the 1960s.

College administrators are caught in a vicious circle they can't get out of until they stop hiring SJW profs and stop letting in students with 'SJW' stamped all over their applications.

Liberal professors were common enough that they gave into the ridiculous student radicals’ ridiculous demands (often enough), instead of smoking them out or expelling them en masse, as they absolutely would have done had they been little nazis instead commies.

If it’s escaped people that the big leftward swing to the era of the PC university–a.k.a. the Long March through the institutions–was caused by the 60s uprisings, that’s because victors write history and they want people to think that the ruling intellectual class came to power by force of argument, not force of arms.

Actually, they don’t want you to think there’s a ruling intellectual class at all. But in case you notice, you should think it’s based on Truth and Beauty, not “Up against the wall!”

Putting aside whether this was even true, the Spanish response was to force all Spanish inhabitants to convert to Catholicism.

Umm, no. The Spanish government told them they had that become Catholic as a condition for remaining in Spain. Considering the era it was not an unreasonable request, especially (though not only) not from the point of view of statecraft, and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified, however much we may regret the excessive overlap between Church and state in the particular Inquisitions there. Catholic Spain was not even remotely comparable to the monolithic tyranny and barbarian apologetics of the latter-day intersectional left - nothing in Western civilization has ever been except potentially the Nazi regime and that doesn't count as it was effervescent and had plenty of establishment opponents - , no matter how much it may be to the disliking of a number of us here and now.

and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified

What happened was that a lot of the Jewish conversos adopted Catholicism wholeheartedly and were extraordinarily successful (think Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, von Neumann, etc.) and within a couple of generations were doing better than those with fully Catholic backgrounds, which naturally made the latter jealous. So one way to get rid of these people was to falsely accuse them of being “secret” Jews. It had nothing to do with loyalty to any foreign power. To what foreign power would secret Jews have been loyal?

John Kerry was a rank-and-file Boston lawyer who succeeded in winning by slim margins two Democratic primaries (in 1982 and 1984) in a venue where the Republican Party is weak. Consequent to that, he was elected to the U. S. Senate from Massachusetts. In the last 90 years, a grand total of one Democratic incumbent has been voted out of that office (a man embarrassed by a sex scandal). He also won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 when the two leading candidates abruptly imploded in a sequence of events it is difficult to adequately explain. His career as an elected official bears a resemblance to Lucky Lucky Louis Sears in The Ugly American, except that none of his opponents ever dropped dead 10 days before the election. I assume there's some skill at work in there, but it's hard to discern just where it is. While we're at it, Kerry's maternal side relations are bluebloods and there's little indication he knew much about the Jewish side of his family (or even that he had a Jewish side); his grandfather and great-uncle selected the name "Kerry" before they migrated to the States. His wife was also blueblood (and from a verry wealthy family).

Madeleine Albright had a completed dissertation, which is an accomplishment. Notable about her work life is the degree to which it was based on making connections which led to one post after another which she occupied for a limited run of years, all of them one might wager interesting but none having robust operational measures of competence (assistant to this person, research assistant here, fellowship there, visiting faculty there, campaign aide there). One crucial component of that prior to 1982 was that she married quite well (again, to a blueblood). Like the man says in Chasing Amy: "Hey, I'm people that know people!".

Note, one was a diplomat's son admitted to the bar, the other a professor's daughter who completed training for an academic career. These people are successful after a fashion, but not in the manner of someone who builds his own business, or climbs the latter to take the helm of a large extant business, or produces a piece of scholarship from which others take instruction.

and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified

What happened was that a lot of the Jewish conversos adopted Catholicism wholeheartedly and were extraordinarily successful (think Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, von Neumann, etc.) and within a couple of generations were doing better than those with fully Catholic backgrounds, which naturally made the latter jealous. So one way to get rid of these people was to falsely accuse them of being "secret" Jews. It had nothing to do with loyalty to any foreign power. To what foreign power would secret Jews have been loyal?

John Kerry was a rank-and-file Boston lawyer who succeeded in winning by slim margins two Democratic primaries (in 1982 and 1984) in a venue where the Republican Party is weak. Consequent to that, he was elected to the U. S. Senate from Massachusetts. In the last 90 years, a grand total of one Democratic incumbent has been voted out of that office (a man embarrassed by a sex scandal). He also won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 when the two leading candidates abruptly imploded in a sequence of events it is difficult to adequately explain. His career as an elected official bears a resemblance to Lucky Lucky Louis Sears in The Ugly American, except that none of his opponents ever dropped dead 10 days before the election. I assume there’s some skill at work in there, but it’s hard to discern just where it is. While we’re at it, Kerry’s maternal side relations are bluebloods and there’s little indication he knew much about the Jewish side of his family (or even that he had a Jewish side); his grandfather and great-uncle selected the name “Kerry” before they migrated to the States. His wife was also blueblood (and from a verry wealthy family).

Madeleine Albright had a completed dissertation, which is an accomplishment. Notable about her work life is the degree to which it was based on making connections which led to one post after another which she occupied for a limited run of years, all of them one might wager interesting but none having robust operational measures of competence (assistant to this person, research assistant here, fellowship there, visiting faculty there, campaign aide there). One crucial component of that prior to 1982 was that she married quite well (again, to a blueblood). Like the man says in Chasing Amy: “Hey, I’m people that know people!”.

Note, one was a diplomat’s son admitted to the bar, the other a professor’s daughter who completed training for an academic career. These people are successful after a fashion, but not in the manner of someone who builds his own business, or climbs the latter to take the helm of a large extant business, or produces a piece of scholarship from which others take instruction.

These people are successful after a fashion, but not in the manner of someone who builds his own business, or climbs the latter to take the helm of a large extant business, or produces a piece of scholarship from which others take instruction.

While that is true, it is indisputable that these people are movers and shakers with a significant amount of power. Climbing to the top of the ladder, while not in itself particularly beneficial to humanity, is not an easy thing to do, given all the other contenders for power. I suspect most people would agree Stalin and Hitler had a net negative impact on the world. But they were leaders of major empires. People envy their raw power, not their specific achievements. It is easy to analyze the competition for power dispassionately, but nowhere near as easy to be the contender who emerges on top out of the scrum. Plenty of people wanted to be in Hillary's spot as the Democratic nominee, but they simply lacked the ability/resources to make it happen.

Black people, students included, have been making unrealistic demands since the sixties. This all stems from their inability or unwillingness to assume responsibility for their own actions or inactions.

Very few people of any description go around 'making demands'.

Art, Thank you for the reply and people do make demands and in my comment I said ” making unrealistic demands”, which is basically what every one here is commenting on. Please reply back at 10:07 pm.

Service, labor and trades are all I know. Spouting nonsense and issuing demands gets you fired and makes you the object of humor and derision. I have a niece with a degree in psychology. She is making salads at Whole Foods and happy not to be working in day care or nursing homes or driving for uber.

Your point is well taken. The bs spills over into corporate culture. But for those of us who never went to college it's hard to take this stuff seriously.

I’m with you; I’m working like a madman to escape ostensible success and return to honest labor for precisely the reasons you mention (and an opportunity to live in what’s left of America, escaping the Hellish, unlivable Gomorrahs and Sodoms one must inhabit to be a part of The Machine).

I recommend to you and anyone else interested Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which explores the healthier experience of manual work because of, among other reasons, the inability to fake and bullshit skill and knowledge. The toilet flushes, the engine cranks, and so on … or it doesn’t. There are no points for a .ppt slide that pops (whatever the Hell that even means).

I think "black bodies" comes from the Foucault/"seeing like a state" idea that the state can "see" only bodies and the black body in particular was subjected to state procedures of classification like "redlining" that maintained the structure of racially (bodily) coded domination, etc. Foucault traces this back to Descartes which is even further back than FHA policies of the 1930s. And beneath these social constructions is the black body, which maintains the solidarity of a multitude which is not male or straight or female or endowed with a soul or other humanistic hoo-haw. I think that's the idea though I've never been able to read more than few pages of Foucault, so I could be wrong. Foucault was pretty much required reading in college twenty years ago so now it seems like common sense to a large number of TNC's college educated readers.

Chomsky famously referred to Foucault and the other post-modern theorists as self indulgent charlatans.

Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies....

This writing is unacceptable from a reasonably bright student in high school; it is beyond the pale for an undergraduate, especially in its context as an (ostensibly) thoughtful, vetted, public statement meant to be clear and survive scrutiny. A writer who actually had any business attending college might have written something like:

This school, like this nation, was founded upon the oppression and degradation of enslaved people....

Mind you, the sentence remains a falsehood (nothing in California, and no school, university, or college anywhere, so far as I know, was ever founded upon marginalising anyone...).

A: Let's establish a university in Athens!

B: Capital idea! Bright young men from all over Georgia can go there to receive an education.

A: No no! You've missed the point. It will be founded to marginalise the stupid by hurting their feelings when they are denied admission!

And that, friends, is the story of the founding of the nation's oldest public university in a nutshell.

My example of a better construction (which I composed and transcribed simultaneously, in about ten seconds) is more concise and less confusing.

• It dramatically reduces unnecessary verbiage.

• It eliminates the hackneyed construction "as well as many others including..." which reads like a six-year-old child's attempts to implement stream-of-consciousness techniques better left to masters like Hemingway and Joyce.

• It omits needlessly nebulous terms like "institution" and "marginalised," substituting concrete terms to better convey meaning. (If the authors did not indeed mean to explicitly cite slavery – possible, since even morons like them presumably know slavery was never practiced in California – then "disenfranchised" or even "powerless" are better words, since they actually convey something specific.)

The rest of the writing is equally atrocious and could also very easily be improved by any competent writer. The instruments these blacks themselves compose to assert they deserve an education betray their ineducability.

Were I the college's president, the only response I would offer to this tripe is a free copy of Lanham's Revising Prose placed in the students' mailboxes, allowing my gift to speak for itself, like so many Tic-Tacs to a man suffering halitosis.

You haven’t kept up with what constitutes college material these days.

This is part of what Tom Wolfe called mau-mauing the flak catchers. You try to throw the bureaucrats off balance by making absurd unreasonable (including unreasonably specific) demands. This is like rock stars asking for the brown M&Ms to be taken out of the candy in their dressing rooms - it's just a way of demonstrating your power.

Actually the brown M&M removal clause had a more practical purpose: to see if the other party actually read the contract.

John Kerry was a rank-and-file Boston lawyer who succeeded in winning by slim margins two Democratic primaries (in 1982 and 1984) in a venue where the Republican Party is weak. Consequent to that, he was elected to the U. S. Senate from Massachusetts. In the last 90 years, a grand total of one Democratic incumbent has been voted out of that office (a man embarrassed by a sex scandal). He also won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 when the two leading candidates abruptly imploded in a sequence of events it is difficult to adequately explain. His career as an elected official bears a resemblance to Lucky Lucky Louis Sears in The Ugly American, except that none of his opponents ever dropped dead 10 days before the election. I assume there's some skill at work in there, but it's hard to discern just where it is. While we're at it, Kerry's maternal side relations are bluebloods and there's little indication he knew much about the Jewish side of his family (or even that he had a Jewish side); his grandfather and great-uncle selected the name "Kerry" before they migrated to the States. His wife was also blueblood (and from a verry wealthy family).

Madeleine Albright had a completed dissertation, which is an accomplishment. Notable about her work life is the degree to which it was based on making connections which led to one post after another which she occupied for a limited run of years, all of them one might wager interesting but none having robust operational measures of competence (assistant to this person, research assistant here, fellowship there, visiting faculty there, campaign aide there). One crucial component of that prior to 1982 was that she married quite well (again, to a blueblood). Like the man says in Chasing Amy: "Hey, I'm people that know people!".

Note, one was a diplomat's son admitted to the bar, the other a professor's daughter who completed training for an academic career. These people are successful after a fashion, but not in the manner of someone who builds his own business, or climbs the latter to take the helm of a large extant business, or produces a piece of scholarship from which others take instruction.

These people are successful after a fashion, but not in the manner of someone who builds his own business, or climbs the latter to take the helm of a large extant business, or produces a piece of scholarship from which others take instruction.

While that is true, it is indisputable that these people are movers and shakers with a significant amount of power. Climbing to the top of the ladder, while not in itself particularly beneficial to humanity, is not an easy thing to do, given all the other contenders for power. I suspect most people would agree Stalin and Hitler had a net negative impact on the world. But they were leaders of major empires. People envy their raw power, not their specific achievements. It is easy to analyze the competition for power dispassionately, but nowhere near as easy to be the contender who emerges on top out of the scrum. Plenty of people wanted to be in Hillary’s spot as the Democratic nominee, but they simply lacked the ability/resources to make it happen.

Steve, I can’t be the first person that has pointed this out, but isn’t it curious that people who attack Trump for “alternative facts” also believe this:

“The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny.”

Even Caltech has fallen. It capitulated in 2015 with the creation of the post of Chief Diversity Officer, in response to the Federal Government’s threat to use Title IX to punish schools with too few students from the right marginalized groups. (The CDO’s gender, academic field, ethnic background, and probable sexual orientation are all exactly as you might guess.)

Tech schools are especially vulnerable to such threats, because the minimum bar is so high. An affirmative-action admit who might skate by with gentleman’s Cs in easy courses at Harvard would get crushed by Caltech’s rigorous Core Curriculum.

His dad, John C. Oxtoby, was an eminent mathematician, best known for work done in collaboration with Stan Ulam, but impressive in his own right. My own thesis work was related to many of the theorems on non-measurable sets in chapter 5 of his textbook "Measure and Category" (I proved some results about when Fubini's theorem can be extended to non-measurable sets).

Steve, I can't be the first person that has pointed this out, but isn't it curious that people who attack Trump for "alternative facts" also believe this:

"The idea that there is a single truth–’the Truth’–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny."

Isn't that the definition of "alternative facts?"

No. Alternative facts are simply facts of which you’re not aware. Because they aren’t accepted by the mainstream as facts, or whatever.

The truth is different. There is no alt-truth, because the Truth is unitary. Truth is just truth.

The letter is filled with academic pseudo-intellectual jargon ("... straddle the intersection of marginalized identities"), with virtually no sentence written in the Queen's English . Your guess may be right, and I would suspect that "main writer" is one of the humanities professors.

The letter is filled with academic pseudo-intellectual jargon (“… straddle the intersection of marginalized identities”)

lol That’s a given. They have learned their BS well. But I would still say the person(s) who wrote it had a high IQ.

and to take measures against those who lied about their conversion in order to infiltrate the Spanish state on behalf of a foreign or Islamic agenda was similarly justified

What happened was that a lot of the Jewish conversos adopted Catholicism wholeheartedly and were extraordinarily successful (think Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, von Neumann, etc.) and within a couple of generations were doing better than those with fully Catholic backgrounds, which naturally made the latter jealous. So one way to get rid of these people was to falsely accuse them of being "secret" Jews. It had nothing to do with loyalty to any foreign power. To what foreign power would secret Jews have been loyal?

Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, von Neumann, etc.

If that’s your standard for Jews who “wholeheartedly embraced Catholicism,” then the Iberians were even more justified in their mistrust of conversos than I had initially thought!

Good point. Albright decamped to Anglicanism in 1959. IIRC, Kerry's petition for an annulment of his marriage to Julia Thorne (to which she objected formally) included the datum that their vows had taken place in an Episcopal Church.

If that's your standard for Jews who "wholeheartedly embraced Catholicism," then the Iberians were even more justified in their mistrust of conversos than I had initially thought!

Good point. Albright decamped to Anglicanism in 1959. IIRC, Kerry’s petition for an annulment of his marriage to Julia Thorne (to which she objected formally) included the datum that their vows had taken place in an Episcopal Church.

Good point. Albright decamped to Anglicanism in 1959. IIRC, Kerry’s petition for an annulment of his marriage to Julia Thorne (to which she objected formally) included the datum that their vows had taken place in an Episcopal Church.

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